Tune-Yards balances gentle parenting with lively experimental production for a charming sixth album. 

Oakland-based alt-pop duo, Tune-Yards, returned with their sixth studio album, Better Dreaming, last month. The record is a pleasing synthesis of the duo’s experimental origins and more recent self-conscious work. 

Tune-Yards, comprised of vocalist Merrill Garbus and bassist Nate Brenner, released BiRd-BrAiNs and w h o k i l l in 2009 and 2011 respectively, which were critically praised for their extroverted experimentalism. The duo dabbled in alt-pop, indie rock and Afropop and found themselves booking major ad campaigns as well as scoring Boots Riley’s epic, offbeat, dystopian film, Sorry To Bother You. Their roaming, erudite energy turned inward on recent records, which find front-woman Garbus ruminating on her place as a white woman working with/in Black genres such as Afropop and funk. 

In “Better Dreaming,” Tune-Yards turns the sermonizing instinct outward, this time molded by Garbus’ experience of parenthood. The album reads like rules of life for listeners-turned-progeny. First track “Heartbreak” hands down you-go-girl, post-heartbreak wisdom, which transitions into communitarian “Swarm” with a recording of Garbus’ toddler’s voice, reframing the advice as warmly parental rather than tritely motivational. 

So goes the rest of the record, which is more often than not sung in the second person: “Turn away from those who hate you / Turn and we’ll become the storm,” “You too are someone’s child.” Blogosphere era darlings, Garbus and Brenner, are the perfect millennials — playing DIY shows in Oakland and Williamsburg in the early 2010s and now fretting about impotence in the face of 24-hour news cycles and hyper-emotionally-attuned parenthood. Better Dreaming is the album for the Greenpoint/Oakland mom who does aerial, dons bright scarves and ceramic jewelry and organizes the Montessori school’s trans rights benefit market. In this house, Tune-Yards believes listeners, too, should be parented gently into loving themselves and, subsequently, their neighbors. 

It could all become too much but third track “Never Look Back” is light on lyrics, which shine a welcome spotlight on the album’s counterweight: its characteristically lively production. That nimble production — leaning on bass and loop pedal — steers the record’s be-yourself-assembly themes away from the saccharine and towards the genuine. A listener not sitting with the lyric sheet could move through the record on its self-assured good vibes alone – not to mention Garbus’s dynamic voice, which capably carries her message (and in moments resembles the great Brittany Howard’s). Even when she goes spoken word-y on “Suspended,” her voice reaches a rumbly, cool growl, delicately offsetting the maudlin with the rock-ish. 

Better Dreaming spins Paramore’s millennial, geopolitical guilt banger “The News” into a full album whose guidance counselor concern for humanity is cut with signature bright and funky instrumentation for an hour of consoling, summery goodness.